Answer: What Are Clinton's Chestnuts?

Question: What was Sandy Berger trying to protect when he was snagged for stealing national security documents?

Cashill.com has a piece on what Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, was really after when he stole and destroyed national security documents.

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel “Sandy” Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

Burglar was portrayed as a bumbling, absent minded professor type by Clinton. Everyone knows that absent minded professors cram their pants with top secrets documents. It's right in their CV. This ridiculous allegation was never questioned by the press.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security advisor, not because of Berger’s foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of National Security Advisor in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

Many of Clinton's advisors never passed security clearance. Remember John Huang and Chinagate?

Based on the testimony of a retired USAF Lt. Col. who was assigned White House duties, Cashill states:

At that time Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high security assignments. One morning in "late-summer,” Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. "I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.

In a chestnut shell, Berger was trying to hide Clinton's knowledge of a possible airborne attack on the US five years before 9/11. And there's more. A lot more...

No Surprise

While rummaging through through Lucianne Goldberg's blog, I stumbled across this commentary from the Rhinelander Daily News (Wisconsin):

If you forgot to make a New Year's resolution, or are still trying to decide on one, let me suggest that you resolve to devote a little time this year to solving the mystery of Sandy Berger and the Destroyed Documents. Pressure on Berger is what is needed, and the united voices of several thousand outraged Americans would provide it.

Several thousand outraged Americans carrying thirty feet of rope screaming outside his front door might do it.

What sorts of things would have impelled Berger to take the very serious risk of stealing those documents from the National Archives and cutting them to bits? Needless to say, Berger has never uttered a word on the subject. Today, his lawyer says Berger considers the matter closed and is seeking to move on.

Berger needs a trapdoor under his feet to loosen his tongue. But what I still can't fathom is why the Justice Department let him off so easy. This really ticks me off. People who have done far less are sentenced to years in prison and this incompetent boob gets a wrist slap.

So far I have found nothing to shed any light on this, but there was a comment on this post that provoked a lot of response.

Reply 7 - Posted by: Evocatus, 12/31/2006 6:46:11 PM
All of the documents stolen by Berger had already been scanned, converted to PDFs and are in very safe storage awaiting an opportune time to be revealed,
accompanied with fresh political charges, and, quite possibly, federal conspiracy charges.

This is not widely known, but those who do need to know, do know this. Not all of the political appointees that have burrowed into the federal civil service system are democratic operatives.

Berger and the Clintons -- both of them -- are searching feverishly for the electronically archived documents and their protectors. Wait until shortly before the 2008 election.

I don't buy into conspiracy theories from either end of the political spectrum and I don't buy into this one either.

"Searching feverishly" for documents? Those pdf files, if they exist at all, are maintained in the primary records management system of the Archives, where they are indexed and stored on probably both the hard drives and back up tapes or whatever media is used for this purpose.

For critically important documents such as these there are also duplicate back ups of documents and system indices that are maintained off site.

I was trained as a system administrator for an optical image system that archived millions of pages of scanned documents. The Clintons know exactly where these files are, if they exist at all.

There will be no surprise in 2008. What we have is government officials who cover each other's asses.

Berger should be in prison, disgraced and penniless.